The Electric Typewriter

by Tony Judt

At first I felt a desperate need for the reassurance of light, company, and the simple comforts of human intercourse. But now I have learned to forgo this most nights, finding solace and recourse in my own thoughts.

by Tony Judt

I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life.

by Tony Judt

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

by Tony Judt

In the West we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise.

by Tony Judt

Night
I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, which constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole. First you lose the use of a digit or two; then a limb; then and almost inevitably, all four.

Girls! Girls! Girls!
In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University - where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university’s Sexual Harassment Center.

Toni
I never knew Toni Avegael, but I am reminded of her whenever I am asked what it means to be Jewish.

by Tony Judt

For a long time I toyed with the option of returning to Europe—but it was in America that I felt most European. I was hyphenated: two decades after landing in Boston, I had become an American.

by Tony Judt

At 58, Israel has no friends aside from the U.S. and its claims of victimhood and anti-Semitism are falling on increasingly deaf ears. The time has come to mature.

by Tony Judt

One is not supposed to love Switzerland. Expressing affection for the Swiss or their country is akin to confessing nostalgia for cigarette smoking or The Brady Bunch. 

by Tony Judt

Just what is a “world city”? Mexico City, at 18 million people, or São Paulo at near that, are unmanageable urban sprawls; they are not “world cities.” Conversely, Paris - where the population has never exceeded three million - was the capital of the 19th century.

by Tony Judt

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.1 It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it…